1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to cluster file systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing shared objects and node-specific objects in a cluster file system.
2. Related Art
Generally, a cluster file system is a shared file system. The cluster file system makes files visible to and accessible by the nodes in a cluster. Each node has the same view. It does not matter whether a file is stored on a device connected to all the nodes or on a device that is private to a single node. By maintaining cache coherency across the nodes, the cluster file system assures that all nodes at all times have the same view of the files in the cluster.
Although cluster file systems provide shared objects (e.g., a file or a directory) across the nodes, most cluster file systems do not provide the capability for node-specific objects such as files and directories. Some cluster file systems provide this functionality using node specific links. This requires that shared objects be duplicated in a node-specific directory. Moreover, these links are manually created.